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Dunedin Smoke NZ’s South Island with and without bushfire smoke (pic from Alpine Guides).
New Years’ Day 2020, Ōtepoti/Dunedin (Aotearoa/New Zealand)
Ironically, my first real-life encounter with the Australian bushfires – not mediated by Facebook, Twitter, or a press article – is the smoke that (...)

This is not the first time that Australia has been devastatingly burned. More than ten years ago, in February 2009, fires in Australia killed 173 people, injured thousands more and destroyed 2,000 homes. The day of the February 2009 blaze, which became known as Black Saturday, constituted the (...)

Harry Creamer, a leading environment activist from Port Macquarie on the NSW central-north coast and longstanding member of Climate Change Hastings, acted for most most of us on November 10 when he gatecrashed Prime Minister Scott Morrison and NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian’s media conference at (...)

The expression ‘tipping point’ refers to the point when a system passes from one system of equilibrium to another, the point where it is no longer possible to prevent accumulated quantitative changes from causing a qualitative change. It is used in many different fields, from population studies (...)

As the catastrophic fires raged over several states from late December into early January, Green Left’s Pip Hinman asked Shaun McDonald, a professional firefighter currently based in Tasmania about his views. McDonald has been a firefighter for 13 years, fighting fires in three states and (...)

It is impossible to find words appropriate to the immensity and horror of Australia’s bushfire catastrophe. Day in day out for months on end we’ve been bombarded with harrowing images and accounts of death and destruction – of roaring walls of flame over 100 metres high; of deadly “fire tornadoes” (...)

The horror of the devastating and apocalyptic fires in NSW and Victoria has not only dampened the New Year party mood, it has fanned anger over the government’s obvious failure to respond to the climate emergency. Singer Tex Perkins’ middle finger salute to the Prime Minister during Sydney’s New (...)

As of 3 January, the forest “mega-fires” ravaged 60,000 km², the equivalent of twice the size of Belgium. 500 million animals were charred in the disaster, say scientists at the University of Sydney. New Zealand’s glaciers are covered in soot. Temperature records have been broken, January and (...)